because you said "western soldier" I am assuming you are alluding to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In which case, religious infighting between Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq, and suicide bombings of civilian centers by (surprise surprise) religious extremists contributed to the body count in both countries. Soldiers did kill civilians, not going to dare to deny that. Your rationale just leaves out a lot

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-NHfLTJ4Gc one piece of the information bradley manning released to wikileaks was a video taken from an apache helicopter of civilians on the ground being murdered by u.s troops, you can hear them laughing. i saw this video thanks to another member of my household and a popular news program. i didn't want to see something like that. it deeply disturbed me. if you watch it and you don't feel the same way it's my opinion that something inside you may be broken. i'm never going to forget it. this type of behavior violates my religious, political and ethical sensibilities, and i think a lot of you here can say the same. as long as this kind of **** is present in our military wasting our tax dollars we have no excuse to sit around and ignore it.

tl:dr: they're out there, and they threaten hundreds of civilians every day they're in combat.

There were people with weapons down there. You could see them. Them pointing out the guy on the cellphone does not prove innocence or guilt. Cell Phones can be used to trigger explosives, discuss operation plans with others, or just talk to a friend. What they saw was a group of people with weapons, somewhat close to their ground troops by what they were discussing. In an area like that it's hard to have clean engagements. They have to take out threats where they get the best chances. People run out of crowds, shoot at soldiers, then run back in, knowing that we can't fire into a crowd just for them. They hide behind their civilians; shooting, but the soldier is to blame when a civilian dies in combat. There are bound to be collateral damages because a soldier can't just not defend himself. Ask any deployed man. I bet none of them want to be there, but that's just where they are. The video depicts a laugh in one instance in regards to the windshield of the van. (The first laugh in the subtitles isn't so. I listened to it repeatedly to hear laughter and it is not there) Now it may seem horrible to you, and death isn't pretty, but understand that these guys experience this a lot more often than you. Do you expect every soldier to sit up all night with a bottle of scotch, drinking and crying over the men they've killed in combat? When your job deals with death, not just a soldier, but any job dealing with death, you become desensitized to it. You don't really have a choice. It's either that or the former I mentioned.

I wouldn't take this video so hard because it is meant for you to just see soldiers in a bad light. Rather than show you the video, and let you make your own opinions, it points out just the things that it wants you to see in it. Like the soldiers point out the RPG, but the arrows edited in only want to say cellphones and cameras. That and the generous laughing in the subtitles that is not there in the audio.

It is a disturbing video, but the Reuters men were killed unintentionally. They made the mistake of embedding with a group of armed insurgents who were carrying RPGs and AK-47s, in an active war zone. When the US troops found that some kids had been wounded they immediately took them to the hospital. It was tragic, but not a crime.

The US and its allies killed about 15,000 civilians in Iraq, terrorists and insurgents killed about 100,000.

my point was not that we kill more people than the opposition. my point is that our military, in control of its own actions, is killing civilians needlessly, and it's common enough to attract attention and we need to handle it. 15,000 people is no ******* game of checkers, and iraqbodycount.org now says it might be more. and those men had no reason to fire on that group. they were not protecting anybody's freedom with those explosives. even with a $1 trillion+ defense budget, those yahoos were wasting money. i think it's logical to speculate that this kind if thing may be becoming somewhat routine. i am not claiming the innocence of the iraqi insurgency. i am saying that i don't want to see us turn into them. every needless action like that is aiding the enemy. a crime.

I understand what you're saying. I myself think that the Iraq war was a very deadly, very costly, very irresponsible mistake, and I too think that the US should scale down its military commitments (because I think they are unsustainable and causing more harm than good to American security). And you're quite right, 15,000 innocent people dead is horrifying, and certainly at least some of those deaths were avoidable. Some might even have been criminal. (I got my figures from Iraq Body Count's interactive database).

Nevertheless, I don't think this particular case was murder. In any war, people make mistakes that end up killing innocent people. Do you shoot, and risk hurting someone who doesn't deserve it - or don't shoot, and risk getting yourself and all your comrades killed? It's just not possible to save everybody no matter how hard you try. In WWII the US deliberately burned alive hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians hoping it would end the war sooner. Today most of the non-combatant dead are killed by accident, not policy, and the numbers are a lot smaller. To my mind, it's hard to imagine how we could reduce that number much further.